They flew to Dublin and took a train to the West. They looked out of the windows at the small fields, the wet cattle and the towns with unfamiliar names written in two languages. It felt quite foreign, even though everyone spoke English.
The bus to Stoneybridge did indeed meet the train as Chicky Starr had promised them that it would. She said she would collect them in her car.
‘How will we know you?’ Henry had asked anxiously.
‘I’ll know you,’ said Mrs Starr, and so she did.
She was a small woman who waved at them immediately and chatted easily as they drove to Stone House.
The place looked exactly like the photograph on the website. The house stood four-square on a gravelled pathway; the light was already going from the day and the windows glowed with soft light. A black and white cat sat in one of the windows, curled up in an impossibly small ball of fur and paws and ears.
Behind them the creamy, frothy foam on the waves rolled in towards the shore and crashed against the stark cliffs, which were somehow both majestic and containable at the same time.
Chicky gave them tea and scones and showed them to their room, which had a little balcony looking right out to sea.
She was calming, and asked them nothing about their lives or the reasons they had chosen her hotel. She reassured them that the other guests, some of whom had already arrived, all seemed delightful people. They lay down in their big bed and drifted off to sleep. A siesta at five o’clock in the afternoon! For Henry and Nicola it was another first.
Only the sound of the gong woke them, otherwise they might have slept all night. Cautiously they came down to the big kitchen and met the others.
Already gathered was an American man called John, who looked very familiar though they couldn’t at first place him. He said he had come here on an impulse because he’d missed a flight at Shannon. Then there was a cheerful nurse called Winnie, who was travelling with her friend, an older woman called Lillian. They were both Irish and seemed an odd couple though each was entertaining company. There was Nell, a silent, watchful, older woman who seemed a bit reserved, and a Swede whose name they didn’t catch.
The food was excellent; the advice about touring the area very thorough. Nobody arrived with a fiddle or an accordion and a medley of Irish songs. As Mrs Starr’s niece Orla cleared the table, the group all drifted off to bed easily without speeches or explanations. Back in their room, Nicola and Henry hardly dared tell each other that it looked like being a success. Over the past two years they had been through so many false starts.
A kind of superstitious magic made them tread carefully but they slept again deeply, and the sound of the waves crashing below the cliff was comforting rather than alarming.
The next morning, they woke to scudding clouds and blustery winds and felt that this was indeed going to be the place that let the fresh air in. Their acquaintance with the other guests was close enough to be familiar but not so much as to be intrusive. When Winnie and Lillian went missing the following night, Henry offered to join the search party in case medical assistance was needed; Mrs Starr said she would rather he and Nicola stood by at the house in case the two missing women made it back by themselves. The local doctor, Dai Morgan, had been alerted and was waiting in his surgery.
‘Dai Morgan? That doesn’t sound very Irish,’ Henry said.
‘No, indeed, he came here from Wales as a locum thirty years ago when old Dr Barry was sick. Then poor Dr Barry died and Dai stayed. Just as simple as that.’
‘Why did he stay?’ Nicola asked.
‘Because everyone loved him. They still do. Dai and Annie settled in very well here. They had a little girl, Bethan, and she loved it all here. She’s a doctor too, now. Imagine!’
The next day, Dai Morgan called round to Stone House to check that the two ladies had no ill effects from their time in the cave. Chicky gave him coffee at the big kitchen table and left him there with Henry and Nicola, who were in between walks.
He was a big square man in his mid-sixties with an easy, reassuring manner and a broad smile.
‘Chicky tells me the pair of you are in the same trade as myself,’ he said.
Immediately they were guarded. They really didn’t feel like answering questions about what they had been doing and how their careers had developed. Still, they couldn’t be rude to the man.
‘That’s true,’ Nicola said.
‘For our sins,’ Henry added.
‘Well, I suppose there are worse than us out there,’ Dai Morgan said.
They smiled politely.
‘I’ll miss this place,’ he said suddenly.
‘You’re leaving?’ This was a surprise. Chicky Starr had mentioned nothing about that.
‘Yes. I only decided this week. My wife, Annie, has had a bad diagnosis. She would like to go back to Swansea. All her sisters live there and her mother, fit as a flea, aged eighty.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ Nicola said.
‘Is it as bad as you think?’ Henry asked.
‘Yes, a matter of months. We’ve had second and third opinions, I’m afraid.’
‘And she has accepted it?’
‘Oh, Annie is a diamond. She knows what it’s all about. No fuss, no drama, just wants to be with family.’
‘But afterwards . . .?’ Henry asked.
‘I wouldn’t have the heart to come back here. Stoneybridge was the two of us. It wouldn’t be the same on my own.’
‘They love you here. They say you made a difference to people,’ Nicola said.
‘I loved it here too, but not alone.’
‘So when will you go?’
‘Before Christmas,’ he said simply.
They talked about him later as they sat in a mountain pub where black-faced sheep came and looked in the door. Strange thing for a man and his wife to have come so far away from their roots, stay so long and then go back in the end.
They still spoke of the Welsh doctor when they were walking over a long, empty beach and were the only people there. What could have persuaded him to stay in a small, lonely place like this where he knew nothing of the patients and their backgrounds?
They talked about him at night in their room with the waves crashing beneath the cliffs.
‘You know what we are really talking about?’ Henry said.
‘Yes, we’re talking about us, not him. Would we find peace in a place like this, just as he did?’
‘It worked for him. It mightn’t work for everybody.’ Henry was anxious not to get swept away.
‘But there might be somewhere, some place where we could be part of things, doing something rather than trying to get round a system.’ Her eyes were bright with hope.
Henry leaned over to her and put both his hands around her face. ‘I do love you, Nicola. Helen was right. I am a lucky person to have a happy life, and that’s because you are the centre of it.’
They found themselves more and more drawn to talk to Dai Morgan. He seemed to like their company. They didn’t give him any false comfort about his wife. They were less buttoned up, less watchful than when he had met them first, and slowly they told him of their hopes of finding a place, a community where they could make a difference; something, in fact, like he had done.
‘Oh, I’ve left a lot undone here,’ Dai Morgan sighed. ‘If I had my time over I’d do some things very differently.’
‘Like what?’ Henry didn’t sound intrusive. He sounded as if he wanted to learn.
‘Like a big bully from the new townhouses over there. I was called to the place twice. His wife Deirdre had some kind of vertigo, he said. She had fallen from a ladder once and from the car another time. Broken bones and bruises. It looked to me as if he could have beaten her. I didn’t like him but what could I do? The wife swore that she fell. Then the third time I knew. But it was too late. She didn’t recover.’
‘Oh, God . . .’ Nicola said.
‘Oh God, indeed. Where was my God, or her God, when that bastard came at her the last time? I didn’t speak before because I only had intuition and a gut feeling. Because I didn’t trust that feeling, Deirdre died.’
‘And did you speak then?’ Nicola’s eyes were full of tears.
‘I tried to but they shut me up. Her own family, brothers and sisters, said that her name mustn’t be tarnished in this way. She must be buried as a loved wife and happy mother, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense of her life. I couldn’t understand it. I still don’t understand it. But if I had it all over again I would have spoken the first time.’
‘What happened to him? The husband?’
‘He lived on here, a few crocodile tears, a few references to My Poor Wife Deirdre. But then he met another woman, a very different kind of person entirely, and the first day he hit her she was straight into the Guards. He was done for assault. He served six months and left in disgrace. Deirdre’s family put it all down to his great grief over his wife’s death. In a way, I suppose, it was a result.’ He looked grim at the recollection of it all.
‘And do you think about it a lot?’ Nicola asked.
‘I used to, all the time. Every day I pass the graveyard where Deirdre is buried. Every time I saw their house, I remembered her face as she swore to me that she fell from a ladder. But then Annie said it was tearing me apart and I would be no use to anyone else in the place unless I got over it. So I suppose I got over it, in a way.’
Dai watched them nod in such genuine sympathy and understanding that he realised they really did understand; perhaps something similar had happened to them too.
He spoke carefully. ‘Annie said that in a way I was putting myself centre stage, making it all my problem, my involvement, or lack of it. There were other factors to consider: he was always going to be a cruel bastard, handy with his fists; she was always going to be a victim. Did I think I was some kind of avenging angel sent down to sort out the world? And it made sense.’
‘You forgave yourself?’ Henry asked.
‘Something else happened just then. I was in my surgery when one of the young O’Hara children was brought in. His mother said he’d got some stomach bug and he was vomiting. She said he was very sleepy and had a temperature. Something about it didn’t seem right to me, and I gave him a thorough examination. I thought he had meningitis and gave the hospital a call. They said he needed to come in straight away for tests. It would have taken too long to get an ambulance out here, so I just picked him up and ran outside and put him and his mother on the back seat. I drove like a demon to the hospital and they were ready with the tests and the antibiotics, and we saved him. He’s a great big lout of a fellow now, could drink for the county. Nice lad, though. He’s very good with the youngest boy, Shay. Takes care of him a bit. Every time I pass by he says, “That’s the great man who saved my life”, and I ask him to tell me one good reason why I should be pleased about this. But I know I did, and that for once I made a difference.’
‘I’m sure it wasn’t just for once,’ Nicola said.
‘Maybe not, but it was a kind of redemption and badly needed at the time, I tell you.’
Henry and Nicola talked about it all as they sat in their room at Stone House waiting for the dinner gong.
‘Redemption . . . that’s what we have been looking for,’ Nicola said.
‘Maybe the Tooth Fairy might find some for us.’ Henry was not dismissive or cynical; he was actually smiling, and held her hand.
They were the first in for dinner.
Chicky and her niece Orla were preparing a tray of drinks for the guests. They were talking seriously about something.
‘What can they do, Chicky? Chain his leg to the bed?’
‘No, but they can’t let him wander out on his own at night.’
‘Try stopping him. He’s going to go out anyway . . .’
When they saw Nicola and Henry they immediately broke off. Chicky was very professional. Domestic matters were never discussed in front of guests. The place ran smoothly, almost effortlessly, though it was all down to careful preparation. They enquired about what Nicola and Henry had done during the day. They took out the bird books to identify a goose that the couple had seen strutting across the marshy fields near the lake. It had pink legs and a big orange beak.
‘That’s a greylag goose, I’d say.’ Chicky turned the pages of Ireland’s Birds. ‘Is this it, do you think?’
They thought it was.
‘They come from Iceland every year. Imagine!’ Chicky paused in wonder at it all.
‘It would be lovely to know all about birds, like you do.’ Nicola was envious of the way Chicky could lose herself in the thought of a goose flying from Iceland.
‘Oh, I’m only a real amateur. We had hoped to have a real birdwatcher for you here. There’s a local boy, Shay O’Hara. He knows every feather of every bird that flies the skies. But it didn’t work out.’
‘It would have been the making of him,’ Orla shook her head sadly.
Chicky felt this needed some explanation. ‘Shay’s not himself these days. He’s depressed. Nobody can reach him. We’re all hoping it’s just a phase.’
‘Depression in young men is very serious,’ Henry said.
‘Oh, I know it is, and Dr Dai is on the case but Shay won’t take medication or go for counselling or listen to anyone,’ Chicky sighed.
The others had begun to arrive in the kitchen so the matter was dropped.
Nicola sat beside the handsome American who was still calling himself John, and who had found a new friend in a local man called Frank Hanratty. Frank had driven him miles over mountain roads in a pink van to meet an old film director who had retired to this part of the world years back. A very pleasant and contented gentleman who had given them nettle soup.
‘Did he recognise you?’ Nicola asked, unguardedly.
Up to now they had never acknowledged out loud that John was in fact a film actor, a celebrity.
John took it all casually. ‘Yes, he was kind enough to say he knew my work. But he was fascinating. He has hens, you know, and beehives and a goat. He has a house full of books – he’s as happy as anyone I ever met.’
‘Extraordinary,’ Nicola was wistful. ‘It must be wonderful to be happy.’
John looked at her sharply but said no more.
Before they went to bed, they went outside to breathe in the cold sea air. Orla was just wheeling out her bicycle and on her way home.
‘Do you ever get tired of this view?’ Henry asked her.
‘No, I missed it so much when I lived in London. Some people find it sad. I don’t.’
‘What about the poor birdwatcher you were telling us about? Does he find it sad?’
‘Shay finds everything sad,’ Orla said, and cycled home.
It was at three o’clock in the morning that Henry and Nicola were wakened by the sound of birds crying out to each other. It wasn’t nearly time for the dawn chorus or the early-morning gathering of the gulls. Possibly it was a bird in distress out on their little balcony.
They got up to investigate.
Silhouetted against the moonlit sea was the thin figure of a teenage boy in a thin jumper, holding his arms around himself, his head back and weeping.
This must be Shay. Shay, who found everything sad.
Without even consulting each other, they put on their coats and shoes and went downstairs. They let themselves out into the cold night air.
The boy’s eyes were closed, his face contorted. They couldn’t make out the words that he was still crying aloud. He was shaking, and his thin shoulders were hunched in despair. He was dangerously near the edge of the cliff.
They moved towards him steadily, talking to each other so that he would not be startled at their approach.
He opened his eyes and saw them. ‘You’re not going to change my mind,’ he said.
‘No, that’s true,’ Henry said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re right. I’m not going to change your mind. If you don’t do it now, you’ll do it later tonight or next week. I know that.’
‘So why are you trying to stop me?’